Empowered Voices – Innovation, Reinvention, and the ETA Model

By Hal Rogoff, Past President, ETA Board of Directors

ETA was born out of an insight: intergenerational programs were not being designed with the reciprocity that can enrich intergenerational partnerships. Youth could fill voids for older partners and elders could be mentoring youth to overcome urgent roadblocks. But how to construct a program with an impact… that would remain low cost… so someone could pay for it? As a Nobel winner said: “If you are interested in something, you’d be amazed what interest can do.”

ETA’s initial ideas for programming were warmly received, but they ran up against the COVID pandemic school shutdown. While ETA gained experience in remote delivery by creating a series of small online-for-COVID programs, ETA reworked (and networked) the original ideas… and… found the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington who wanted a program that would bring high-school students together with mentors. The necessary rework to build this program and deliver it… during the shutdown… actually helped build Crossing Paths, a program that continues today. As Edson said about precursors to the lightbulb: “[I] just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Later, as COVID wound down, Federal Head Start posed a challenge: could ETA extend its model of trained volunteers… to supercharge school readiness? This would require ETA to greatly amplify its training to prepare volunteer mentors for a complex 18-month program. It would include coaching pre-k children in language, reading and computer skills, but also coaching parents to coach their children. As van Gogh said: “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” And thus, the Connections program. And with this, ETA had successfully re-invented and evolved their basic trained volunteer model to deliver offerings that bracketed the pre-college years, reaching pre-k to high school graduation.

For college-age youth, ETA has had programs evolve and expand focused first on working with colleges and then moving into the community. ETA deepened attention to the problem of landing a first “real” job. The goal was to find the gaps in clients’ resumes and support them during practical job experience, building the translating qualifications needed to be hired. The program required both supporting a different age group and wrapping this support around internships and the workforce. This is the program that became Pathfinder. ETA’s volunteers were now reaching young people outside the school context.

Innovation is never a straight path. This small sample of ETA’s many programs is a taste of ETA’s seven-year history leaps, reversals, zigzags and branches… all while innovating on the original idea: reciprocal intergenerational partnerships. As Steve Jobs liked to say: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”